Some organizations reviewed the previous work of a fabricator or plagiarist. Some didn’t. Some promised to institute new practices to prevent these things from happening again. They rarely explained what those were.

The video was picked up by some in the press. Then the next level of the hoax kicked in: journalists were contacted by someone claiming to be from Shell PR to say the video was not real, and asking them to read a website with the real details about the project.

That website was fake, generating a second round of coverage. Two fake Twitter accounts were also set up.

A second well-executed hoax aimed at the press was WikiLeak’s fake Bill Keller column. It featured a fake website meant to look like The New York Times, a fake Twitter account, and the use of real comments by Keller to add authenticity to the hoax column.

The fakes and hoaxes will not be going away, and they will likely become more realistic and elaborate. It’s more important than ever that journalists understand how to debunk them, and help spread these skills among their colleagues and the public in order to stop bad information from spreading, especially during emergencies.

Fact-checking as part of political coverage

2012 was the year political fact-checking established itself as a standard part of election coverage.

The sheer volume of fact-checking, and the variety of media doing it at the national and local levels, helped it go mainstream.

In that swing state, and others, fact-checking is viewed as a way to counter political speech, or at least a way to place it in context for voters.

In 2012, fact-checking itself became more of a target. This is yet another sign it’s arrived in the political arena – people are using talking points to discredit it and the organizations who practice it.

If fact checking were a reality, many of the thousands of articles printed about George Zimmerman would each require a retraction.
For plagiarism, look no further than Michael Stolnik. He has never seen a statistic he didn’t want to claim/print as his own work as long as it furthered his agenda.